Buddhi S.

Sharma
Manager,
ACECOMS, AIT
About the Author
Introduction
Some of the most frequently asked questions by
the general public since the recent Asia Earthquake
and Tsunami are
Knowing that the Earthquake scale/
magnitude at Sumatra, Indonesia measured
9 on the Ritcher scale (RS), what is the scale
of that earthquake in my city?
What Ritcher scale earthquake can my
house/building withstand?
Can you design a house/building to resist
an earthquake measuring 8 or 9 on the
Ritcher scale?
What is the extra cost to design a building
for earthquake?
How often will such earthquake occur?
Can humans not do something to control
earthquakes?
In addition to all the above questions, there are a
several other issues that the general public would
like to know and be aware of. The main objective of
this article is not to address the hard core technical
concepts, theories, methods, procedures, etc. related
to the questions faced by an engineer but to share
some general ideas and knowledge that an engineer
can find helpful while attempting to answer these
questions from general public.
The situation of an engineer when somebody asks
him the above questions is analogous to that of a
medical doctor when a patient asks him the
following questions:
How long will I live?
How often will I fall sick?
What is the maximum fever that my body
can sustain?
Can you give me something in advance that
helps to fight against various diseases?
The above analogy makes it clear that though the
questions sound quite simple, obvious and straight
forward, the answers are not instant. A doctor may
be in a position to answer some of those questions
(deterministically or probabilistically) after detailed
examination, tests, judgments, etc. and with some
reservations and within certain limits. A similar is
the situation of an engineer while attempting to
answer the questions related to earthquakes.
Who is Qualified to Answer?
For human body, which is of very complex nature,
we need so many specialists to provide health/
medical services. No single doctor can answer all the
questions related to the functioning of the human
body or its problems. Similar is the case with
engineers. Earth itself, being a complex object, has
several fields of studies to understand it from
different perspective and applications. Ideally a
person who can be considered as fully qualified to
answers all the earthquake related questions, faced
by engineers, is the one who has in depth knowledge
in geology, seismology, meteorology, geotechnical,
structural engineering, etc. However, can we find
someone like this? In the present day of super-
specialization, probably not. Therefore, it is not a
single person who can answer these questions, but
a team of experts from all these areas of
specializations. Practically, structural engineers are in
the front line facing the public and in turn have to
Recent Large Earthquakes:
- 9.5 in 1960 in Chile
- 9.2 in 1964 in Alaska
- 9.1 in 1957 in Alaska
- 9.0 in 1952 in Russia
-9.0 in 2004 in Indonesia
On average every 10 Year!
What Richter Scale Earthquake
can my Building Withstand?
Can this Question be Answered?
4
September 2004 - February 2005
acquire the information from
various fields of studies,
assemble it and apply it to
solve the public safety related
problems. Another reason is
that while all other disciplines
provide information on how
earthquakes may effect a
structure it is the structural engineer who designs
the structures to counter the effects of such ground
shakings. Let us now look at some of the
background concepts and their relationship to the
task of the structural engineer.
Measuring Earthquakes
There are two ways in which we can quantify the size
of earthquakes: magnitude and intensity.
Magnitude is a measure of the amount of energy
released during an earthquake. Almost everytime,
when an earthquake occurs, we hear news reports
on the magnitude of the earthquake using the
Richter scale. Magnitude of an earthquake is a single
number regardless of where it originates and where
its felt but intensity will vary from place to place.
Using a simple analogy to illustrate the intensity
and magnitude, is dropping a stone into a water
pond, the difference between magnitude and
intensity is similar to the difference between the
height of the splash exactly where the stone hit the
water and the height of the waves over the pool.
Therefore in general, the intensity is greater near the
epicenter than at large distances from the epicenter.
This decrease in intensity with distance is known as
attenuation. Earthquakes are measured by
seismographs, some of which are shown in Figure 1.
How a seismograph works?
To give an overall idea about how a typical
seismograph works, lets consider the simple device
shown in Figure 2.
A heavy weight is fastened to a horizontal
rod as shown in the diagram.
This rod hangs from a pole and is free to
swing from side to side when the ground
shakes.
At the other end of the rod (away from the
pole) is an ink pen and directly underneath
the pen is a piece of paper rolled around a
cylinder.
This cylinder rotates so that the pen
continuously draws an ink line along the
moving paper.
If the ground does not move, the rod does not
swing, and the pen stays in place, so the ink line is
smooth and straight. If the ground shakes,
however, the rod swings and therefore the pen will
draw a zigzag as the paper turns. The stronger the
shaking, the sharper the zigzags. This zigzag picture
made on the paper roll is called a seismogram. A
sample of such a seismogram is shown in Figure 3.
What is Richter Scale?
The Richter scale was invented in the 1930s by Dr.
Charles Ritcher, a seismologist at the California
Institute of Technology. It is a measure of the largest
seismic wave recorded on a particular
kind of seismograph located 100 km
from the epicenter. The wave height
is measured by seismograph (type of
pendulum with an ink pen or digital
recorder) and the output is called
seismograms.
As the measurement is based on
logarithmic scale, a wave 1 mm (1000
microns) high on a seismogram has
magnitude of 3 (because log(1000)
Magnitude of an
earthquake is a
single number
regardless of
where it originates
and where it's felt,
but the intensity
will vary from
place to place.
Figure 1: Digital seismographs
Figure 2: Conceptual seismographs
Magnitude 7
e a r t h q u a k e
produces waves
10 x 10 = 100
times as high and
release energy 32
x 32 = 1024 times
as great as a
magnitude 5
earthquake.
Figure 3: Sample seismogram
September 2004 - February 2005
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Article
L = Fault Length (km)
M = Earthquake Magnitude
Vd = Long-term Slip Rate (mm/year)
Tr = Recurrence Time (year)
(Kakimi Model Used for Tokyo City)
Figure 4: Relationship between L, M, Vd
and Tr (Kakimi Model)
Figure 5: Expected pick accelerations for
Bangkok (Warnitchai and Lisantone, 1996)
Figure 6: Common way to present the
performance of a building (Source: ATC-40)
=3). Similarly, a wave 10 millimeters high would have
a magnitude of 4. For reasons that a factor of 10
change in the wave height corresponds to a factor of
32 change in the amount of energy released during the
earthquake, magnitude 7 earthquake produces waves
10 x 10 = 100 times as high and release energy 32 x 32
= 1024 times as great as a magnitude 5 earthquake.
Therefore in general sense, an earthquake of 8 RS is
not twice as strong as the 4 RS earthquake but many
thousand times stronger than 4.
Why Seismic Map not based on
Richter Scale?
Originally Ritcher scale was developed and used
primarily to compare various earthquakes at different
locations. It is primarily related to wave height and
energy. Relative to engineering design perspective,
structures are designed to withstand the forces and
deformations. Newtons well known second law
of motion, states that force is related to mass and
acceleration. This means that if we can estimate the
acceleration of a structure due to an earthquake we
can calculate the force applied on the structure.
The mass of the building can be easily calculated
from the geometry and material property of the
building.
Engineers and researchers have done a lot of work
to understand and correlate the important factors
that determine the effects of earthquakes on
structures such as the length of active faults, slip
rate, the distance from source, magnitude of
earthquakes, frequency of occurrences, and ground
acceleration (to find force) at the building site. An
example of such correlation is shown in Figure 4.
Knowing that the ground movement of a certain
fault and its distance from the
point under consideration, one
can find the earthquakes
magnitude and its recurrence
period.
Earthquake and Building
Performance
Structural responses of a
building to an earthquake
depends upon various factors;
primarily the origin (epicenter),
magnitude and frequency of
ground motion, geological and
soil conditions, and dynamic
characteristic of a building.
Methods, codes, software tools,
etc. in current practice for the
seismic design of buildings are
based on the following
philosophy.
Buildings should be able to resist:
Minor earthquakes without any damage
(occupy immediately after earthquake)
Moderate earthquakes with negligible
structural damage and some nonstructural
damage (may need some repair)
Major earthquakes with predictable major
damages (building remains standing but
only barely).
A properly designed building must respond
to strong earthquake without collapse.
In the past, buildings were designed to resist some
estimated earthquake forces. This kept the door
open for questions from clients, What will happen
to my building if earthquake of higher magnitude
hits? To answer these What If type of questions,
there is a promising trend towards using the
Performance Based Design. This approach
attempts to answers the questions in qualitative if
not in quantitative sense. With the current
knowledge and computing technology, it is possible
to predict the performance in terms of level of
damages, safety, etc. of the buildings for various
levels of earthquakes. Pushover Analysis is one of
the computational methods for such predictions.
Performance-based design together with Pushover
Analysis provides engineers with valuable insight
to actual performance of a building during an
earthquake.
For Bangkok, PRA and Return Period:
0.025 g for 50 year
0.050 g for 500 year
0.075 g for 2500 year
Article
6
September 2004 - February 2005
RS and Acceleration:
The currently
r e c o m m e n d e d
maximum design EQ
level for Bangkok
(PRA = 0.075g) is
based 7.5 RS EQ at
Kanchaburi and 8.0
RS on Andaman sea.
Figure 7: Sample design spectrum
for Bangkok (Warnitchai 2004)
Consideration of Designing New Building
New buildings can be designed to resist the
anticipated level of an earthquake during the service
life of the building. A typical procedure of design
for a new building for earthquake load is as follows:
Carry out the seismic hazard analysis of the
site where the building will be located or use
the information available from reliable
source for that area to find the design
accelerations
Perform the preliminary design of the
building based on experience or quick
calculations
Compute the primary dynamic properties of
the building (natural frequencies, mode
shapes, damping, etc) using appropriate
computer tools
Use code specified methods to compute the
forces due to earthquake
- Equivalent Static Methods (often
considered highly simplified)
- Response Spectrum Methods
(considered intermediate method)
- Time History Methods (generally
considered rigorous method)
Most of the commercially available software
(such as ETABS, SAP2000, etc) provide
facilities to use any or all of these methods.
Alternatively the better approach (but
requiring more manual calculations) could
be to compute the forces using modal mass,
displacement demand, force and
superposition approach. This method has
several advantages over the other methods.
The main one is that the analyst can study
the effect of individual modes and their
contribution.
The most common practice is to use the code
specified response spectrum to compute the design
forces due to earthquake, combine with other dead
load, live load, etc. and design the system/
component for the combined loads.
From the above discussion, we can see that though
the buildings are not directly design for given Ritcher
Scale of earthquake, there exist some correlations
between RS and design spectrum. These correlations
form the basis in the development of the design
spectrums or acceleration maps which we can find
easily be based on design codes.
For example, the current recommended maximum
design earthquake level for Bangkok is based 7.5 RS
earthquake at Kanchaburi and 8.0 RS in the Andaman
Sea. This means, that if we design a building for the
PRA=0.075 g, this can be understood as that the
building has been designed for 8.0 RS in Adaman Sea.
Evaluation of
Existing Building
This topic will be discussed in detail with a real
project case study in the next issue of this magazine.
Improving the Seismic Performance of
Existing Building
This topic also has been discussed in detail in article
Swinging the Towers In the September 2003 to
March 2004 issue of this magazine. The main idea
is to identify the weak points in the structure by
detailed inelastic analysis (such as pushover) and
provide the engineering solutions with an objective
to achieve a target performance level.
Additional Cost
From the authors experience and several other
references indicate that the typical range of cost
difference between earthquake and without
earthquake loads for buildings is 3-5% of the total
project cost and 10-15% of the structural cost.
Concluding Remarks
Earthquakes are a natural phenomenon. Although
humans are unable to control the earthquake itself
but we are able to control or/and minimize the loss
of life and properties. This is the main philosophy
behind the earthquake resistant design in current
use and in the foreseeable future. With state-of-art
knowledge in earthquake and related fields, most
of the questions from engineers and general public
can be addressed in a probabilistic way if not in a
deterministic way.
Article
September 2004 - February 2005
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